


land

by cirrus (themorninglark)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Introspection, M/M, Post-Canon, The Barns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-11-12
Packaged: 2018-08-30 13:24:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8534860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/cirrus
Summary: An answering cry rang out from far away. Adam could not tell if it was Chainsaw, or another dream, flying free among the sycamores in Singer's Falls. Perhaps it was just an ordinary raven. Somehow, it seemed entirely plausible that Ronan had sung, and the land itself had responded.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I've always thought that the setting of TRC was so vivid it was practically another character in its own right, and that was one of the things that inspired this fic.

 

 

Somewhere in the dark, a violin was straining to sing, and Adam Parrish woke to a raven's plaintive keening and a nip on the bridge of his nose.

"Hey," he murmured, stroking the smooth feathers on top of her head. "Chainsaw. What's up?"

Chainsaw let out a soft _kerah_ and appeared to instantly lose all interest in Adam. She spread her wings, warm breeze stirring, and swooped low across the room. The door stood ajar. Beyond, Adam saw the faint sliver of a shimmering, dancing light, the kind of light that shifted too much in the shadows. It did not come from any moon in the sky.

He heard it again, that discordant note of a desperate string drawn taut, plucked for want of a bow. It did not surprise Adam in the least that a Lynch dreamer had dreamt a violin without a bow. Another one of Ronan's childhood toys, perhaps. Beautiful, and flawed; to the rest of the world, useless, in Ronan's hands, a rough, raw music waiting to be coaxed forth.

Ronan never pulled perfect things from his dreams.

Adam stirred. He shook off the rumpled blankets, reached out to the space on the bed where Ronan had been lying. Still warm. Chainsaw had left their room. Adam did not know where she had gone.

He sat up and went in search of Ronan. He had fallen asleep in one of Ronan's old tank tops. It was long on him, frayed at the seams, colour faded like a long, slow drive into the moonlight, and it felt like a second skin he had worn without knowing for a while now.

As he made his way through the house, he glimpsed the outline of Ronan's sharp silhouette against the night before he saw his face. There was a floating orb in the living room, spinning lazily round Ronan's head, a halo-like illumination that seemed so surreal to Adam that he had to rub his eyes, look again to make sure Ronan was still _Ronan_.

 _Well,_ there he was, in the flesh. No angel by any stretch of the imagination, but—

Neither was Adam, and he knew that Ronan believed in greater things than angels, and God.

The orb drifted over to him, a will-o'-the-wisp in incandescent glass, spun bubble-thin and light. Adam brushed it gently out of the way and came closer. Ronan sat by the window, curtains drawn. He did not look up. Adam heard the music stop anyway.

He leaned back, against an ornate, baroque cabinet stacked haphazardly with music boxes and spring-wound clocks that all told different times, crossed his arms and remarked, "I didn't know you played the violin."

From his perch, Ronan's gaze flicked upward. Adam felt all the breath rush out of him, rise again.

"I don't," Ronan said.

Adam cocked a curious eyebrow at him. "Well, that explains why you're holding it like a guitar."

"Ha. I don't play the guitar either."

"And _that_ explains the horrendous screeching."

Ronan sucked in a reproving breath. His sharp, sudden grin was a spark; Adam, the flint. "Cold, Parrish, _cold_. Even for you."

"Always a pleasure. What are you doing?"

Ronan gave the violin one more ear-splitting strum, and lowered it onto his lap. He shifted sideways, propped his legs up on the bay window seat and kicked one foot against the wall. He was all angles, framed like this; and Adam's own fingertips burned against his skin to see Ronan run his hand along the violin's body, pluck a jagged, reckless melody across the strings.

The tune he picked, tempo rising, was no lullaby. Ronan had not had trouble sleeping for a while, not since Adam moved in.

"I was dreaming," said Ronan, "and when I opened my eyes, I was thinking of my father."

"Ah," said Adam. He paused, drank in the silence with Ronan, for a poignant moment.

"So you went looking for him."

Ronan reached for a tuning peg, fiddled with it as he nodded. "I went to his study. I found this under the desk. Damn near forgot about it… he was the one who taught me music, you know?"

"One of yours?" Adam asked. Eyeing the violin, sinuous and bold and a darkened red that would not have looked out of place entwined in Ronan's tattoo, he already knew the answer.

"Dreamt it when I was a kid. I think I was having a rebellious phase. Imagine that."

"You rebelled," said Adam, dryly, "by dreaming a violin. How very classical."

"I don't think you understand the sheer fucking joy of learning Celtic jigs for days on end, Parrish."

"I understand the sheer fucking joy of listening to you sing them in the shower," said Adam. They both smiled.

Ronan, for good measure, let out a jaunty, piercing whistle, and started to hum.

An answering cry rang out from far away. Adam could not tell if it was Chainsaw, or another dream, flying free among the sycamores in Singer's Falls. Perhaps it was just an ordinary raven. Somehow, it seemed entirely plausible that Ronan had sung, and the land itself had responded.

He followed Ronan's gaze to turn towards the window, flung open to let the night in. Here, on the edge of Henrietta and its living, breathing forests, all the roads that wound and unwound and led to magical places and then, to places stripped bare, the stars shone fiercer, brighter. Beneath their pulsing light, there lay a land that remembered. Untamed fields that burst into wildfire crimson when the azaleas bloomed, dark foothills and valleys like scars where the shadows fell.

Adam was struck, as he always was when he looked out at the landscape of the Barns, by a sense that he was very, very small. They were no masters of this country, not even the Greywaren. Merely its keepers. And that was okay.

"I don't remember my dream," said Ronan. "I remember fewer and fewer of them, these days."

He tilted the violin upward again and ran a thumb across its strings. His voice was rough, quiet.

Adam thought about it.

He thought about Ronan, slipping into sleep. Ronan's breathing, deep and peaceful, on Adam's cheek; even in his deaf ear, he could _hear_ it, feel it. The rhythm of it matched his heartbeat. They slept like this, tangled up in sheets and limbs and the touch of each other.

"I think," Adam ventured, "that they're good dreams. Whatever they are."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Even the ones about your father."

Ronan ran a hand over his head and rubbed the back of his neck absently.

"You loved him," said Adam.

"I really did," said Ronan. "I really fucking did."

So much, Adam knew, that it hurt. He was coming to understand what it meant. Sometimes, it was all he could do not to let it engulf him; every time he thought he'd seen into the depths of Ronan Lynch and reached out, not to smooth over the cracks but to learn every inch of them, he found another fire smouldering beneath.

It was the only way Ronan knew how to love, gloriously and furiously.

So it was that he breathed life into the Barns, into rebuilding this home, and more than life, _hope_. And _Cabeswater_ , Adam felt with a sudden burst of pride, would be a thing of breathtaking beauty when Ronan was done; when the mending was over. If it could ever be.

They would stay, and try anyway. Adam had made that promise. Not to Ronan, but to himself.

Ronan did not play a lullaby. There were times when dreaming alone would not suffice. There were times for wakefulness, and as he plucked out a plaintive tapestry of notes that wove together into something _more_ , what rang out was a hymn, of the _Ronan_ sort. Adam did not need to go to church to know that.

A hymn to old Virginia, to family, and love.

Adam, lips slightly parted to remember the touch of those strong, elegant fingers, thought of the soft places that lay savagely buried below all of Ronan's angles. He held out a hand.

The night fell silent once again. The wind rustled through the fields, and the land whispered, patient. Ronan set his violin aside.

He stood up, crossed the room, and went to Adam.

 

 

 


End file.
